Silent payments scanning requires the public key from each eligible input. For P2PKH inputs, the public key is in scriptSig. Access to scriptSig is also needed to identify P2SH-P2WPKH inputs, whose public key is in the witness stack (see #35380).
btck_transaction_input_get_script_sig serializes the scriptSig through btck_WriteBytes callback and is exposed on the C++ wrapper as GetScriptSig().